Frances Calderón De La Barca

By Howard T. Fisher and Marion Hall Fisher

Frances Erskine Inglis, daughter of a prominent lawyer and Freemason, was born in Edinburgh in 1804. As the Marquesa de Calder&oacuten de la Barca, she died in Madrid's Royal Palace in 1882. During her life she was a teacher, legation hostess, and successful author, remembered now for her travel classic Life in Mexico and semi-fictional The Attach&eacute in Madrid. But her books tell nothing about the greater part of her far-ranging career, which led through a half-dozen countries in response to bankruptcy, extortion, marriage, diplomacy, and revolution.

For this colorful biography the authors have drawn from many sources, including contemporary memoirs, diaries, and numerous letters by and about Madame Calder&oacuten. Sometimes her trenchant commentary on people and places flared into newspaper controversy. From all that can be discovered about her, she emerges as a person of high abilities, energy, and nerve. In addition to the spirited woman at the center of the story, there are also her extraordinary family and a cast of memorable minor characters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514421369

Howard T. Fisher

Before her marriage, Marion Hall worked for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Her future husband, Howard T. Fisher, was an architect and later the founder of the Laboratory for Computer Graphics at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. When Marion and Howard married in 1939, they each had previously read and relished Frances Calder&oacuten de la Barca's Life in Mexico, published in 1843. As a hobby that enriched their frequent visits to Mexico over a period of a quarter-century, the Fishers created the highly praised 1966 Doubleday edition of Madame Calder&oacuten's vivid classic. After finishing that project, they turned to this biography. Although they died before shaping the book into final form, it has been completed by their son Alan H. Fisher, a lawyer and guidebook writer. For him Madame Calder&oacuten has been like a close relative since the time of his earliest memories.

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Copyright © 2016 by Alan Hall Fisher

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Front cover image: Frances Erskine Inglis Calderón de la Barca Papers with Howe and Other Family Papers, 1799–1988 (call no. MS Eng 1763, item 57). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Rev. date: 10/16/2020

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CONTENTS

Editor’s Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1     A Baptismal Scene

Chapter 2     Her Time and Place

Chapter 3     Education

Chapter 4     An Open Dancing House

Chapter 5     Adolescence

Chapter 6     Presentation to the King

Chapter 7     Youthful Novelist

Chapter 8     Italy

Chapter 9     Bankruptcy

Chapter 10   Extortion and Emigration

Chapter 11   Boston

Chapter 12   Scenes at the Fair

Chapter 13   Nahant Summer

Chapter 14   Pride and Poverty

Chapter 15   Four-Sided Nobleman

Chapter 16   That Incomprehensible Family

Chapter 17   Marriage

Chapter 18   Preparations for Mexico

Chapter 19   Land of Pulque and Pronunciamientos

Chapter 20   Fast Work

Chapter 21   Parish’s Fancy

Chapter 22   Biding Time

Chapter 23   Diplomatic Glory

Chapter 24   The Court Circle, Revolution, and Flight

Chapter 25   Palace Years

Citations

Editor’s Foreword

Frances Calderón de la Barca, née Frances Erskine Inglis, was born in Edinburgh in 1804, the fifth child of a prominent solicitor reputed to be thriving in business. Mr. William Inglis owned his six-story residence in the fashionable New Town. His firm’s offices occupied another house nearby. And he had recently purchased a large country house on sixty-three acres in the ancestral Erskine area west of Edinburgh. His wife was from a family—the Steins—known for the beauty of its women and the overexpansion and collapse, late in the eighteenth century, of its immense whiskey business, which at one time had paid more in excise duties than the entire land tax of Scotland. According to a memoirist who recalled Edinburgh’s social coteries during the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Inglises belonged to the city’s gay set and kept a sort of open dancing house. Eventually their family included six girls and four boys. Fanny, as she was called throughout her life, even when presented to King George IV as a seventeen-year-old Miss, was educated at home by a strict governess and hired masters. She grew up to be a woman of high abilities, energy, and nerve. Her life’s course led from Scotland to the United States, Mexico, and continental Europe. Wherever she lived, her vitality endeared her to friends, who recognized also the discipline and uncomplaining fortitude of the Inglis women under difficult circumstances. After Mr. Inglis went bankrupt and died in France, where he had fled to escape arrest for debt, Fanny and her mother and sisters immigrated to the United States and established a school for girls in Boston. The Inglis women were capable instructors in all accomplishments suitable for young ladies, including history, English and French literature, natural and moral philosophy, and the French and Italian languages. Piano, harp, dancing, German, Latin, and Spanish were taught for extra fees.

After her marriage to Angel Calderón de la Barca, a Spanish diplomat who later advanced to minister of state, Fanny became a notable hostess in Washington, Mexico City, and Madrid. Twice in Mexico and once in Spain she witnessed revolutions and even helped her husband to escape in disguise from the last, of which she said that it is one thing to see a revolution, and another to be in a great measure the object of it. When Fanny in her late fifties became a widow, Queen Isabel II of Spain appointed her to take over the education of the nine-year-old Infanta Isabel. For the last twenty years of her life, Fanny lived mainly in Madrid’s Royal Palace, first as the Princess’s teacher and later as her beloved friend, and there she died in 1882.

It is not, however, for any of these things that Fanny is remembered now, but rather for two books, Life in Mexico and The Attaché in Madrid, written fourteen years apart at times when money was short. The first achieved substantial success. Still read by present-day visitors and armchair travelers, Fanny’s account of two years in Mexico as the Scottish wife of Spain’s first minister plenipotentiary to newly independent Mexico is so lively and eye-opening that it often sparks curiosity about the author. Apart from what has been said already, what can be told about this observant and gifted writer?

The answer is provided here by Marion Hall Fisher and Howard T. Fisher, who edited and annotated the 1966 Doubleday edition of Life in Mexico, which The New York Times called a sumptuous new version because it included copious illustrations, much new material from Fanny’s private journals, and 142 pages of explanatory notes that enlighten the reader and heighten his enjoyment of the text. After finishing that project, the Fishers turned to this biography. Although they died—Howard in 1979 and Marion in 1983—before shaping the book into final form, it appears here as a complete biography and will be welcomed by those who have enjoyed Life in Mexico and even by those who have never heard of it but like good company. In addition to the spirited woman at the center of the story, there are also her extraordinary family and a cast of memorable minor characters.

The Fishers were my parents, so I do not think they would mind that occasionally I have condensed what they wrote and in some places have expanded it. In particular, I have supplied Chapters 19, 23, 24, and 25, based largely on my parents’ research notes.

The many letters included in this book often contain not only old-fashioned spellings and peculiar punctuation but also outright errors even by the standards of the time. These features have been retained and even the word sic is never used because it would be pedantic and tiresome and detract from the aura of spontaneity that the letters project. Words that are underlined in the original handwritten documents appear here in italics.

My recollection of my parents’ ambitions for this biography is that they wanted to create a book somewhat in the style of Fanny herself—a bouillabaisse of manners, customs, personalities, society, politics, diplomacy, clothes and fashions, landscapes and cityscapes, and other ingredients. The result, of course, was that the work kept expanding. Part of my job has been to shrink the project back down. I feel now that the important thing is to make the essential story widely available while I am still alive. Powerful online search engines will make this book and the research on which it is based easily findable—indeed, impossible to miss—by anyone interested in Frances Calderón de la Barca.

Many thanks are due to Mary Carlisle Howe of Washington, DC, and Newport, Rhode Island, who was a descendant of one of Fanny’s older sisters, Richmond Margaret Inglis Macleod. Thanks also to Mrs. Howe’s son, the late Dr. Bruce Howe, and to other collateral relatives (Fanny had no children) for permission to use family documents that they supplied to my parents. Thanks likewise to Dr. Guillermo Gallardo of Buenos Aires, a descendant of Francisco de Paula Calderón de la Barca, brother of Fanny’s husband, Angel Calderón de la Barca. With an extraordinary generosity of effort, Dr. Gallardo culled through his collection of letters from Fanny to his ancestor and transcribed by hand numerous selections that provide insight into Fanny’s last twenty years of life.

Many librarians and manuscript curators have helped with the citations, including Dr. Maria Castrillo, Curator, Manuscript and Archives Collections, National Library of Scotland; Alison Clemens, Archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University; Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Reference Librarian, Massachusetts Historical Society; Allyson Glazier, Dartmouth College Library; Susan Halpert, Reference Librarian, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Catherine Larson Ricciardi, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Dr. Daniel N. Rolph, Historian & Head of Reference Services, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Lisa Schoblasky, Special Collections Services Librarian, Newberry Library; Joe Smith, Notre Dame Archives; Weatherly Stephan, Manuscripts Specialist, New York Public Library; Olga Tsapina, Norris Foundation Curator of American Historical Manuscripts, The Huntington Library; and in particular, Christine Wirth, Archives Specialist, Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, who responded with remarkable speed and interest to many inquiries. Thanks also to Caroline Carpenter, a student at Claremont Graduate University, for research at the Huntington Library, and to Joseph Duncan of Gilman School, Baltimore, for his translations of Fanny’s letters to Francisco de Paula Calderón de la Barca.

Friends and relatives—John K. Anderson, Ellen B. Williams, and Francis Dummer Fisher—helped me by reading various drafts and making suggestions. And finally I am very grateful to my cousin Nancy Marion Hall, named in part for her aunt Marion Hall Fisher, for her proofreading and other professional help.

Alan Hall Fisher

Baltimore, Maryland

[e-mail]

Preface

Would that the subject of this book had undertaken her own biography, for she wrote with ease and verve. Moreover, she knew the whole of her picturesque story while we, in spite of diligent search, do not.

She is remembered today by those who do recognize her as the author of Life in Mexico, a work that has continued to endear itself to generations of readers since its first publication in 1843. Life in Mexico is timeless, both as an entertaining travel book and as penetrating historical commentary, and those who read it still profit from the perceptiveness of a born reporter who shares her relish, modified by occasional disapprobation, for new experiences.

She was more than the author of a memorable book. For all her very considerable worldliness and obvious enjoyment of position, the foundation of her character was solid and staunch. She could absorb misfortunes and deal with them. She was a worker and a giver as well as a sharp-edged critic. She earned her living for many years at a time when comparatively few women of her status worked for money. She was loyally, lovingly concerned with her large family group. And she was an infectious source of pleasure to friends. The enviable buoyancy of disposition that comes through so clearly in the pages of Life in Mexico would be diminished by time and grief but never wholly extinguished.

Most of her own and nearly all of her family’s personal records have disappeared. Those that do remain are divided among many places on three continents. She described one loss herself many years after the event: she had left with a friend, she wrote to another friend in 1859, an old desk filled with journals, papers and letters. . . . These, and even the desk that contained them, were unfortunately burned! Judging by materials that do survive, a wealth of uncensored social history and frank revelations on the ups and downs of a varied life perished in that fire.

Two of her journals still exist, and significant patches of her life can be pieced together from many sources. Among them are the public prints that mention her family, sometimes merely to announce births, marriages, and deaths, and at other times more startling because various of its members seem to have had a fateful attraction to trouble. Many letters also survive: letters she wrote herself, a few written by relatives, and likewise revealing letters that friends and acquaintances wrote to one another about the lively and at times luckless family group of which she was a part.

We have tried to base this book on solid documentation and reliable sources. When we have resorted to surmise we have said so, and admittedly some of our guesses may be wrong. Many areas of her life remain tantalizingly blank. Perhaps one day some of these blanks can be filled in from material unknown to us or now unavailable. Time grows short, however, and we have wished before it is too late to share with others this vivid personality who has been our imagined companion on travels to places we would otherwise never have seen—who was, in effect, the instigator of intermittent bouts of research on her behalf—and to tell what we can of her story.

Of course, no one who knew her is left (she died in 1882), but the curious, continuous overlapping of lives, some of them very long ones, links her with her own ancestral past and with the day this page is written. At a time when she was an eager student in a home schoolroom in Scotland, Blackwood’s Magazine for August 1818 ran a piece about the death of an old man who as a young soldier had talked with her intrepid great-grandfather, born in 1687, as he lay dying on a battlefield in 1745. And we the authors carried on a correspondence with her Spanish grandnephew, no longer living, who retained a clear childhood memory of an occasion when he was required by his elders to perform a Basque dance for a visitor of consequence—the former Queen Isabel II of Spain—and it was his great-aunt Fanny, then an old lady but one still well able to deal with a piano, who struck up the appropriate music.

Marion Hall Fisher, 1983

Baltimore, Maryland

Chapter 1

A Baptismal Scene

She was born in her father’s house at 49 Queen Street in Edinburgh on a Sunday, December 23, 1804. On another Sunday nearly four months later, April 16, 1805, the Reverend Dr. David Ritchie, a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, baptized her with the name of Frances Erskine Inglis. (And from here forward in this book, she will always be called Fanny, which is how her family and later her adult friends called her, how she called herself, and even how she was listed when she was presented to King George IV as a young woman.) According to custom, the names of her parents and the occupation of her father are shown on the baptismal record, but the entry in her case is out of the ordinary in that it gives also the names of two of the witnesses. It seems likely that this supplementary information was included at the wish of her legally trained and rank-conscious father, William Inglis. The witnesses named were the Earl and Countess of Buchan.

David Steuart Erskine, eleventh Earl of Buchan and then sixty-one years old, was first cousin once removed to William Inglis; that is, the deceased Lady Frances Erskine, for whom the baby was being named, had been both Buchan’s aunt and William Inglis’s grandmother.

Although we cannot know the direction toward which Buchan’s thoughts may have strayed at times on the occasion of his young relative’s baptism, many people knew from experience the subject he found unfailingly entrancing and habitually introduced into his conversation. It was his Erskine ancestry, shared now with the infant Fanny. If one went back far enough, as Buchan did, the family’s forebears included Malcolm III of Scotland, Robert the Bruce, Robert II (first Stewart or Stuart king), and Katherine Swynford, ancestress of so many kings and queens (including Britain’s present monarch). Chopin, well accustomed to aristocratic drawing rooms in several countries, would find the Scots pursuing their bent for genealogy some forty years later: who begat whom, and he begat, and he begat, and he begat, and so on . . . was his paraphrase of polite Edinburgh talk. But even in a society that drew refreshment from the discussion of family trees, Buchan’s pride of birth attracted comment from his contemporaries. Many years before Fanny was born, he had in 1766 declined a junior diplomatic post abroad because, according to anecdote, it would have entailed serving under a man whose social rank of baronet was inferior to his own—as discussed among other places in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, where the very conservative Johnson defended Buchan’s refusal on the grounds that had he done otherwise, he would have been a traitor to his rank and family. (Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography suggests that a different motive for Buchan to turn down a foreign post was that his father was seriously ill and in fact died the next year.) Beyond dispute is what Buchan said about himself. In the middle of an account of his home parish of Uphall in the first volume of Archaeologia Scotica, or Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, he injected the following personal assessment written when he was still well under fifty (he would survive to close on eighty-seven): I employ myself no more in occupations which have become unnecessary, and which are suited neither to my strength of body, nor to the sensibility of my mind, which unfit me for the rough climate, and the rough manners of the lower ranks of mankind.

In turning now to what may have passed in the mind of William Inglis, father of the child whose baptismal day it was, admittedly we resort to pure conjecture. If he had initially felt a pang of regret that his fifth child was a fourth daughter rather than a second son, all disappointment would have melted in seeing a strong, well-endowed child grow and thrive. Moreover, what was there to prevent his blooming wife, who had borne five children in seven and a half years of marriage, from bearing more, fine boys among them?

Inglis, the younger of the two sons of Richmond Gardiner and her husband Laurence Inglis whose profession had been that of a writer (to use the Scots term for a solicitor), was continuing the legal firm founded by his father in 1761. William advanced over his father professionally in that he achieved membership in 1789 in that specialized group of writers or solicitors termed Writers to the Signet, a body whose members had the exclusive right to handle all transactions, of which there were many, requiring the royal signet. Barristers, or advocates as they were termed in Scotland, might be considered by some as having more prestige socially and professionally (William’s older brother Henry David Inglis had elected the career of advocate), but Writers to the Signet earned quite as much as advocates and often far more. William Inglis owned his house on Queen Street in the New Town section of Edinburgh, and he had bought a few years earlier a sixty-three acre estate, with a house large enough for any number of children. It was located twelve or thirteen miles west of Edinburgh on the road to Glasgow in the ancestral Erskine area of Uphall and Broxburn. He was therefore not only William Inglis, W. S. but also William Inglis of Middleton.

He was well known in Edinburgh as a leading Freemason (his portrait appears on page 22) and as an outspoken liberal in politics; that is, he was a Whig as were also his Erskine cousins and likewise his wife’s relatives, the Steins. With no hope of reward, apparently, Inglis in 1805 became a burgess of Edinburgh in order to work for much needed borough reforms—reforms that eventually were implemented. Born in 1764, he was forty or forty-one years old on the baptismal day of his daughter Fanny. One sees him as a sanguine, attractive figure, a man who had tasted moderate success and was eager for more, and moreover the possessor of a genuine concern for equitable government and for political freedom. There is more than one hint that he shared his cousin Buchan’s intense pride of family. This trait when compounded with the economic complexities of the period seems in time to have affected his business judgment, as we shall see.

If he sensed on this April Sunday a familiar aura of complacency and condescension oozing from his cousin the earl, he could have countered mentally with the defensive thought that the lines of his ancestry in which Buchan had no share were honorable if not brilliant, for he came of a family of Lowland gentry whose descent ran straight back for more than four hundred years to the Sir William Inglis who had taken up the general challenge hurled by a marauding English knight for any Scotsman who dared to meet him in single combat. Inglis slew the enemy Englishman and was rewarded with a barony in 1396.

(This, perhaps, is a convenient place to inject information kindly passed on by a modern-day bearer of the Inglis name—one also descended from the fourteenth-century Sir William Inglis. The name in Scotland is and was pronounced to rhyme with the word mingles.)

Another valiant progenitor of the nineteenth-century William Inglis was his mother’s father Colonel James Gardiner, whom his cousin Buchan could claim as an uncle-in-law but not as a blood relative. Inglis had never seen this grandfather but would have known his story well, for it had been written up by the clergyman who preached Gardiner’s funeral sermon, and the little book had gone through edition after edition after its first appearance in 1747. Inasmuch as some of Gardiner’s traits—courage, presence of mind in a crisis, and a strong sense of duty—would reappear in his great-granddaughter Fanny Inglis, this is the place to tell his story.

Born in 1687, the son and younger brother of officers who died in army service, James Gardiner was commissioned an ensign at the age of fourteen. When he was eighteen years old, he took part, on May 23, 1706, in a crucial battle in the Netherlands—a great victory for the British in the War of the Spanish Succession—that of Ramillies. While leading an advance party and shouting to his men—probably in that horrid Language which is so peculiar a Disgrace to our Soldiery, as his godly biographer wrote—he was struck by a sizable ball that entered his open mouth and passed out through his neck without touching his teeth, his tongue, or a single vertebra, leaving an aperture into which he could and did insert his fingers. Abandoned and weak and coughing out blood to keep from choking to death, he maintained the presence of mind to consider the little store of gold pieces he carried. Clenching them into his left hand, he turned his wound to advantage by allowing blood to drop and congeal over his fist during the long cold night. He was picked up next morning by a party of civilians who considered dispatching him but instead filled him with spirits and sent him and his undiscovered gold pieces by barrow toward a neutral town. His party lost its way and left him unattended outdoors for a second night.

On the third day he was delivered to a convent, and there, under the nursing of its nuns, he slowly recovered health and strength. He was later exchanged and resumed fighting under the great Duke of Marlborough. After the peace he was sent to Paris as aide-de-camp to John Dalrymple, second Earl of Stair, ambassador to France from 1715 to 1720. Gardiner was entrusted with, and honorably carried out, various confidential missions between Paris and London. At the same time he was notorious for his wayward private life. A splendid looking young man over six feet tall, a graceful horseman and skilled swordsman, and the possessor of immense charm of disposition and likewise a superb constitution, he became famous during these Paris years for prodigious feats of joyous dissipation and was widely known as the happy rake.

In July 1719, when he was thirty-two years old, there came to him the experience that irrevocably changed his life. He had spent an evening in gay company, in anticipation of a subsequent assignation with a married woman (which his biographer thought the more to be censured because it was the Sabbath). Alone and waiting for time to pass, he began to read a book on religion sent him by his mother. He suddenly felt himself all but blinded by a blaze of light and then by a vision of the Savior. Rendered all but unconscious by the experience, he recovered himself, paced his room all night in a passion of remorse, and thereupon launched on a totally altered course. Although his own sense of logic and the strict precepts of his Presbyterian upbringing made him certain, initially at least, that his past conduct forecast perdition, he soon discarded despair and became an imperturbable advocate of his newfound faith and soon was as well known for strong, cheerful piety as for his former spectacular sinfulness.

He married Lady Frances Erskine in the summer of 1726, continued in the army, and rose to command a regiment of dragoons. Honest, pious, bold Gardiner, as a military colleague later termed him—who had experienced a definite premonition of his own death and had bade his wife a final farewell—fell in battle in September 1745. It was the time of the great Highland rising under Prince Charles Edward Stuart on behalf of his exiled father James, the Old Pretender. The rebellion would fail but was then near its zenith. The government forces that included Gardiner’s dragoons confronted the Highlanders—who had taken Edinburgh but not its formidable castle—at the nearby village of Prestonpans on the Firth of Forth. Gardiner, who knew the terrain well, was said to have urged an immediate attack to gain more favorable ground. He was overruled and the next morning led his regiment into the short grisly battle. He was badly wounded at once but fought on, trying desperately to rally whoever among the broken troops would follow. Then, struck off his horse by a scythe mounted on a pole, he was fatally wounded by a Highlander wielding a great two-handed broadsword. The place where Gardiner fell was almost within a stone’s throw of his own garden wall.

As to what Jane Inglis, the thirty-one-year-old mother of the infant Fanny, might have been feeling on this April day in 1805, we can only speculate again: maternal pride, surely, over this latest addition to her splendid brood and quite possibly gratification over the fact that her husband’s cousin the Earl of Buchan and his countess were gracing the occasion and that those who mattered in Edinburgh would be reminded of their kinship, for Jane Inglis would prove to be a socially enterprising woman as her children came of age.

She had been born a Stein, a family known for the business initiative of its men and the beauty of its women. Although the Steins’ pedigree could not compare in bravura with the Inglis-Erskine-Gardiner descent of Jane’s husband William, and although the Steins at this time lacked the connections with the aristocracy that would come later, they were of vigorous, respected stock. Presumably of Dutch origin (Steen and Stevin were older spellings of their family name, pronounced Steen), their record in Scotland begins with the death of John Stein in 1615. The more recent Steins were capable entrepreneurs who had gained wealth, lost much of it, and regained at least some of it in a single specialized field: whiskey. Jane Stein Inglis was the granddaughter, the daughter, the sister, the niece, the niece-in-law, and the first cousin five times over of large-scale distillers. Her father, James Stein, had owned and operated the largest distillery in Scotland, that of Kilbagie in Clackmannanshire, founded by his father, John Stein. And her uncle, also named John Stein, owned the nearby distillery of Kennetpans. Before the onset of business reverses beginning in 1788 (so reported the clergyman who summarized the economic status of his parish for the Statistical Account of Scotland, published in 1795), the excise duties paid by these two Stein distilleries had brought in more revenue to Britain’s exchequer than the whole land tax of Scotland.

The Steins and some of the Haigs were closely related. In 1751 Jane Inglis’s aunt Margaret Stein had married John Haig—her cousin by virtue of an earlier Haig-Stein marriage—of the distilling branch of the ancient border family of Haigs of Bemersyde, and all five of their young sons, soon after their father died in 1773, had been trained at their Stein grandfather’s Kilbagie distillery. The Steins and the Haigs both produced whiskey with great success and profit almost exclusively for the London market. They had originally sought this English outlet because of the difficulty of competing at home with the innumerable small-scale distillers of superbly concocted but frequently illegal Scotch whiskey who successfully evaded the excise officers and thus paid no tax. But English producers of spirits combined to undercut their Scottish rivals, the Steins and Haigs, and in time they pressured Parliament into a series of moves that increased the tax levied on whiskey imported from Scotland. The Steins and to a lesser extent some of the Haigs, with too many of their barrels in this London venture, faced ruin. The Steins’ two Clackmannanshire distilleries, with their vast walled complexes of substantial buildings and their costly equipment, were sold to creditors in the early 1790s for a fraction of their value. This crisis seems to have occurred when Jane Stein’s three brothers were young adults and when she herself was about twenty.

The younger Stein men, Jane Inglis’s brothers, who perhaps possessed separate assets of their own, soon achieved success in spite of their father’s financial disaster. When Fanny Inglis was born in 1804, her uncle John, a nondistiller Stein, was a Member of Parliament and was fathering a family of children closely matched in age to those of William and Jane Inglis. The New Statistical Account of Scotland of 1845 shows John Stein as the owner of Kennetpans House, picturesquely situated on the margin of the Firth of Forth, and Fanny’s uncle Robert Stein, who was a distiller, as the owner of Kilbagie House, the mansion in which Jane Stein Inglis had presumably grown up. In 1826 Robert Stein of Kilbagie would take out a patent for an improved still whose users would pay him a penny a gallon royalty, and until the invention by someone else in 1830 of an even better still, Robert Stein’s pennies must have mounted to many thousands of pounds.

But let us leave this baptismal scene to consider the world beyond the Inglis family circle and some of the events that would shape their fortunes.

Chapter 2

Her Time and Place

Always, in the background, there loomed the long war with France. It had begun in 1795 before any of the Inglis children were born and ceased briefly only to break out again in 1803, and it would continue with another respite in 1814 until the final victory at Waterloo in 1815. The peak time of worry over a French invasion had passed late in the summer of 1804 not long before Fanny Inglis was born, when watchers on the British side of the Channel could clearly see through a glass the fleet of flat-bottomed open boats, reckoned at some two thousand, ranged in the harbor of Boulogne, and could watch the heavy concentration of French troops, estimated at 120,000, as they went through smart drill formations for the benefit of the visiting Napoleon. But the sustained calm weather that the French needed never came, and windy autumnal weather stirred up a barrier of rough seas.

In the autumn of 1805, there was a sudden invasion alarm close to Edinburgh. Beacon fires were lit and a fighting force mustered in haste from all directions. Walter Scott, not yet a published novelist, rode his horse a hundred miles in less than twenty-four hours to the point of rendezvous, but the alarm proved false. Nonetheless, he was delighted with the general enthusiasm that had thus been put to the test and above all by the rapidity with which the yeomen of Ettrick forest had poured down from their glens, under the guidance of his good friend and neighbor, Mr. Pringle of Torwoodlee, according to Scott’s biographer, John Gibson Lockhart. After a sham battle and high conviviality, the defenders dispersed. Even after the brilliant victory at far off Cape Trafalgar in October 1805 permanently crippled the French-Spanish fleet, Scotland’s coastal signal towers were still manned day and night, and the capital was alert for trouble, unlikely though it might be. William Inglis was an officer in a volunteer group of nearly five hundred riflemen with supporting artillery called the Loyal Edinburgh Spearmen whose duty it was to act as a home guard in an emergency. When its chief officer shot himself to death while hunting, Inglis succeeded to its command in 1805 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Edinburgh, then as now a peerless gray stone city, held fewer than ninety thousand souls. The Old Town with its congeries of ancient buildings was dominated by the Castle on its rock. In front of the Castle was the esplanade, from which, via a natural spine, the Old Town’s main thoroughfare descended through the Lawnmarket and High Street, lined with tall narrow houses, and continued via the Canongate to the Palace of Holyrood. Across a ravine, the New Town on its sloping plateau was developing in accordance with its boldly conceived plan of broad streets and harmonious buildings. In Fanny Inglis’s early childhood, only three of the New Town’s main east-west streets were built up. Queen Street, built about 1780, was for a time the northern limit of an oblong of substantial plain party-walled stone houses. In front the land that would later become the Queen Street Gardens was then unplanted and frequently covered—never on Sunday, of course—with the drying laundry of the Queen Street proprietors. The rows of houses that would later face the Gardens on the opposite side were far from complete, and beyond them the terrain sloped down to the Water of Leith. From Queen Street’s upper windows one glimpsed the Firth of Forth and the hills of Fife. West of Charlotte Square there lay only open fields and woods that rang with birdsong. All this would change during Fanny Inglis’s girlhood with the orderly development of new streets, handsome crescents, and terraces to the north and west.

Edinburgh possessed more than its splendid setting, fine fresh air (too fresh, some complained, when the east wind blew long and sharp in the spring), and noble buildings. Its university even then ranked among the great, and determined country youths possessed of thirty pounds or even less and a willingness to live in an attic and subsist on porridge and herrings could sit under some of the ablest teachers in Europe. Memoirs of the period dwell on the general high level of education; on the respect accorded to learning as well as to blue blood; on the spacious minds, fine manners, and salty personalities of Edinburgh’s outstanding elders, both men and women; and on the good cheer and ease of its social life.

One gets a glimpse of what Edinburgh parties were like (and what they had been like in an earlier time) from the pen of the Earl of Buchan, who wrote a friend about recent festivities in the spring of 1806. Buchan noted approvingly that there was "more taste in conducting them than there was long ago, more music and less wine, no Punch and no brawling Politics to deform Social Intercourse, no Bragg no Gambling and less pawing than heretofore."

Edinburgh’s baptismal records give off the city’s native aroma of the times: the very large numbers of fathers who listed their occupation as coachman or gentleman’s servant; the plenitude of gardeners; the many excise officers and dealers in spirits; the remarkably large number of printers, publishers, and booksellers; the many teachers and, ascending the social scale, lawyers of all kinds. The little city was a huge manufactory of litigation, for Scotland’s legal system was its own, and the system’s center was Edinburgh.

It was in the winter, spring, and until the courts adjourned in July that Edinburgh was at its liveliest. The gentry who during other months preferred their country properties came into town, some to sue one another in the courts, others to put urban polish on their younger children, and all to partake of the city’s social life—split in two, except for large gatherings, between the more numerous Tories and the cohesive Whig minority—and also to cast appraising eyes on likely prospects for their children who were of an age to marry.

In 1806 the Whigs, of whose number William Inglis was one, came into power for a short time, and the careers of the Earl of Buchan’s two younger lawyer brothers, both of whom had already achieved eminence, were further enhanced. Years earlier in 1783 Henry Erskine had been, during another brief period of Whig supremacy, Lord Advocate for Scotland, a position that combined the duties of attorney general with some of the powers of a home secretary. Later he had served as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates until he had been voted out of office for attending a Whig demonstration against proposed bills to make easier the prosecution of sedition and treason. Now in 1806 he was again made Lord Advocate in a coalition ministry of all talents that collapsed the next year. Sunny-natured and immovably steadfast in his principles, Henry was as unassuming, witty, and openhearted as his older brother Buchan was proud and domineering. Henry was widely known as one who would take a poor man’s case without concern for payment. He was a delight in company and according to a friend was the only Whig in Edinburgh who was welcomed with warmth in Tory circles. He owned a modest country property called Almondell not far from William Inglis’s Middleton, and apparently the two men were friends as well as cousins. There has come down among some of the Inglis descendants the tradition that Henry Erskine, whose own children were grown, was a caller when he came to the Inglis house, not only on the adults in the drawing room but likewise on the occupants of its schoolroom and nursery. While Henry was once again, if only for a short time, Lord Advocate of Scotland, one of his appointments—which may have had little significance other than temporary prestige—was to name his cousin William Inglis Agent for the Crown in Scotland.

The fortunes of Thomas, third and youngest of the Erskine brothers, likewise reached a peak in 1806 when he was named Lord Chancellor of the realm and was elevated to the peerage as Baron Erskine. Having left Scotland as a penniless midshipman of thirteen and having later served in the army, Thomas Erskine finally, after having lived on a shoestring while he studied, qualified for the bar. He soon developed an enormous civil practice. Like his oldest brother Buchan, he was a vain man, but like his next brother Henry, his heart was generous and his temperament fearless. As a liberal and a fighter, he took on the defense of Thomas Paine in 1792 against the charge of sedition for having written The Rights of Man. This case Erskine lost, but he won many others, chiefly in the areas of maritime and commercial questions and—what brought him public attention and popularity—in defending cases of libel, sedition, and freedom of the press. As an immensely successful trial lawyer, he made a fortune, which he later let slip away through overspending, involvement in government rather than in legal business, and poor investments. In this same year of 1806, his diplomat oldest son David, who had been serving in Washington, DC (and who had married an American wife), was promoted to the rank of British minister there.

Also in this same year of 1806, before she was two years old, Fanny Inglis would have been shown, in November, an infant and told that he was her new brother. He was given the name of Henry, and once again the Earl and Countess of Buchan obliged with their presence at an Inglis baptism.

The next Inglis child was a girl, born fourteen months after Henry, on January 15, 1808. Baptized with the name of Henrietta, she seems never to have been called anything but Harriet. The passage of another fourteen months brought the birth of William, his parents’ third son and eighth child, born March 4, 1809.

Thus in this spring of 1809, the small Fanny Inglis at four years old was approximately in the middle of a cluster of closely spaced children. Whether at this time there were seven or eight living we do not know, for the record, or rather the lack of record, for two of the family’s daughters is baffling. The oldest child, Catharine, born in midsummer 1798, was ten and a half at this time of reckoning in the spring of 1809, and the next, Richmond Margaret, was something over nine. James Gardiner Inglis, named for his gallant soldier great-grandfather, was seven and a half. The next Inglis child, whose birth was announced in the November 1803 issue of Scots Magazine, was a daughter, but where and when and with what name she was baptized we